ACM Multimedia 2013 Open Source Competition winner is….

Essentia 2.0 beta, is an open-source C++ library for audio analysis and audio-based music information retrieval released under the Affero GPLv3 license (also available underproprietary license upon request). It contains an extensive collection of reusable algorithmswhich implement audio input/output functionality, standard digital signal processing blocks, statistical characterization of data, and a large set of spectral, temporal, tonal and high-level music descriptors. In addition, Essentia can be complemented with Gaia, a C++ library with python bindings which implement similarity measures and classiﬁcations on the results of audio analysis, and generate classiﬁcation models that Essentia can use to compute high-level description of music (same license terms apply).

Essentia is not a framework, but rather a collection of algorithms (plus some infrastructure for multithreading and low memory usage) wrapped in a library. It doesn’t provide common high-level logic for descriptor computation (so you aren’t locked into a certain way of doing things). It rather focuses on the robustness, performance and optimality of the provided algorithms, as well as ease of use. The flow of the analysis is decided and implemented by the user, while Essentia is taking care of the implementation details of the algorithms being used. An example extractor is provided, but it should be considered as an example only, not “the” only correct way of doing things.

The library is also wrapped in Python and includes a number of predeﬁned executable extractors for the available music descriptors, which facilitates its use for fast prototyping and allows setting up research experiments very rapidly. Furthermore, it includes a Vamp plugin to be used with Sonic Visualiser for visualization purposes. The library is cross-platform and currently supports Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Essentia is designed with a focus on the robustness of the provided music descriptors and is optimized in terms of the computational cost of the algorithms. The provided functionality, speciﬁcally the music descriptors included in-the-box and signal processing algorithms, is easily expandable and allows for both research experiments and development of large-scale industrial applications.